A Fitness App That Adapts

Slapping the name of UFC welterweight champion Georges "Rush" St. Pierre on a fitness app might seem a craven marketing ploy: There are plenty of UFC fanboys – the aspirational and gym-devout – who will download and follow each exercise in an attempt to get in the shape of one of the promotion's most famous fighters. But the Touchfit:GSP personal training app has a surprise for the rest of us, including an adaptable, all-encompassing routine with aspects of body-weight exercises, interval training, and even gymnastics that will help anyone build their strength, balance, speed, and explosiveness. It's also admittedly fun to follow one of the fittest people on the planet through simple bodyweight exercises, giving pointers on good form and technique, all delivered in his charming French-Canadian accent.

The app will start you with a nine-minute test consisting of a short warm-up (shadow boxing, jumping jacks, and a light jog), followed by three short rounds of body-weight exercises. St. Pierre demos each exercise and after each one, you'll rank its level of difficulty. Touchfit will adapt its future selection accordingly. Pushups a bit too easy? You'll get pike pushups the next go-around. Can't do an exercise at all? A modified version will be presented instead.

After your fitness test, which you only have to take once, you can select how long you'd like to train for: 20, 40, or 60 minutes. You'll get three to seven rounds of training, again combining upper body, lower body, and core exercises, sandwiched between a quick warm-up and cooldown. The 500+ selections (which you can scroll through in the exercise bank) never require anything more than a mat and an elastic resistance band, so you can work out anywhere you can get a WiFi connection.

While some of the exercises are obvious – squats, crunches, leg raises, and burpees – the selection is extremely comprehensive. Plank variations and single-leg squats will test your strength and balance, and even St. Pierre himself looks like he's putting concentrated effort into some of the more challenging selections: single-leg hop jumps, pike flutter kicks, and handstand pushups, to name a few.

Whether it's possible to achieve St. Pierre's level of fitness without throwing some serious iron around is debatable, but Touchfit's individually tailored workouts provide enough challenge and variety that improvements in fitness levels are sure to follow. [$6.99, gspofficial]